Calvin and Hobbes, eh? That ran in the Hull Advertiser (The Hull Daily Mail's free weekly newspaper delivered to every home in HDM's circulation area) for a while a few years ago. Dunno why it stopped, maybe too expensive. Strange they would use an Express strip anyway, their direct competitor Daily Mail & General Trust (owner of the national Daily Mail and Teletext) owns the Hull Daily Mail.

I think that CALVIN and HOBBES only ran for around 10 years , 1985-95. [a decade is not really all that long in this field].The fact that the reruns still appear freshly-minted is a tribute to the timelessness of BILL WATERSON'S work.

BILL also refused to license the characters for merchandizing, which I respect him for, as it must have lost him a fortune in royalties. [any T-shirts.mugs etc you see featuring these characters are rip-offs------allegedly.]

Cummings could be controversial in his cartoons but whether you agreed with his views or not he produced great looking work. Very distinctive style, lovely line work and he was a very good caricaturist.

I was at the Cartoon Museum in London last week and they have quite a bit of his work in their current Margaret Thatcher exhibition. Lots of Scarfe, Steadman, Trog and others on display too - even a Giles.

I remember my dad used to get the Scottish Daily and Sunday Express regularly and that (and by association the "UK" Express papers) had a fantastic comic page in the Sunday edition - I can't remember many of the strips but it was alarge broadsheet and had a massive full page of strips, adventure , western and funnies - I remember a wonderfully drawn Western strip (drawn by an artist called something like "Weaver??)and the James Bond strip and looked forward to reading that paper once my dad had finished with it so worth looking out - UK had some great newspaper strips from Sporting Sam to Bristow to Jeff Hawke at the time up there with some of the best.

Matt, when a political cartoonist draws Michael Foot with crossed eyes and waving a stick in the air as informed comment, he will get no respect from me. Regardless of ideology, that just reduces political cartooning to a playground mentality.

Brendan, that sort of characterization of a public figure is standard practice in the age-old business of political caricature and no different from those found in the work of Gilray, Scarfe, Steve Bell or Fluck and Law.

Cummings certainly did worse than crossing a subject's eyes but my original point to Peter was that although Cummings would occasionally use representations that I consider offensive (not the Michael Foot one), I enjoyed his draughtsmanship and thought he was a skilled caricaturist.

Matt, the likes of Bell, Scarfe et al. going back to Gillray and Cruikshank put their caricatures within a political context. Political cartoonists use their caricatures to emphasize a public contradiction of policy or shallow pragmatism or some suchlike double standard. Cummings' cartoon of Michael Foot was a stand-alone drawing of him waving his walking stick in the air with his eyes crossed. if my memory serves me correctly this was to accompany a news piece in which Foot started a sing-song on board a delayed flight and made a few jokes at Margaret Thatcher's expense in order to pass the time. He hardly warranted a half-page childish attack of this nature. The ironic fact of the matter was that Cummings was encouraged to start his cartooning career on the left-wing Tribune paper, edited by one Michael Foot.

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